Nothing says privacy risk more than an API

Less than a handful of years ago, mention the three letter acronym 'API' to a regular Internet user and you'd have got the look of "stay away from me, you scary unwashed software geek who is about to bore me to tears" (that's the bleeped version of the internal dialog). Now everything has changed. Not only is API part of the regular semi-tech word-dropping of web users, lack of one can raise questions about the viability of a modern web application. A publicly available API is a badge of honor for startup web apps that says "the information we have is worth being consumed by other apps, so its got to be good enough for you too". 

The Application Programming Interface, or API, is the technical Lego brick that lets developers from across the globe plug into an application, to use the data and functionality of the website without the annoying user interface of that website getting in the way. It makes it easy for other applications to see the data that you as a regular logged in user can see, as long as you click the OK button to authorize it to do so. If you can see details of your friends lives, there is a good chance that by authorizing that app by entering your password that app can see the details of your friends lives too.

A well thought out API is not technically the problem. Many APIs recognize that they are a great way to trawl through far more data than could be done by just browsing the website and protect really private stuff effectively. The problem is still that an API can allow a fairly anonymous developer to collect tons of data, process it and store it extremely rapidly. That developer has their very own, possibly limited privacy policy that you as a user of the primary web service have no control over. Your friend who clicked an OK button authorized a developer to access to your data as a proxy of what they could do on the website. You had no say in the matter that a third party app now has access to the data your friend sees on the website.

In the majority of cases the API itself is not the problem. It is what it stands for in terms of the sheer amount of data a web service has. Re-phrasing what I said at the beginning:

"API" says that a web app collects, stores and makes accessible a lot of potentially personal information that any number of third-party applications might find valuable to consume and reuse

The real problem is that in most cases the information web apps have is not original data and a work of exceptional creativity. It is data collected from its users who enjoy sharing details of their lives with their friends and occasional strangers. It is the data stored in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, et al. The data is largely personal and untouched, beyond being transformed in a way that allows it to be retrieved in an instant. When you read "API" on a social networking site, consider this: the website in question probably collects a lot of personal information about its users and their daily habits and actions. Can you trust the developers that tap into your data through the API as much as you trust your friends?

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Facebook welcome pages - but why?

Last night I received a question from a customer asking how his new Facebook welcome page can help the ranking of his main website. He suggested it was a dumb question, but when you think about it carefully it is hard to see the link between all the effort that goes into Facebook and getting the rankings on a regular website up so you can convert more visitors to new business.

So, it is not a dumb question at all. Here is the way I look at it, and it is likely that social media gurus will be able to scream at me and say I'm missing something. So go ahead, scream! That's what the comments box at the end of the post is there for...

But back to the real issue, how does a fancy Facebook welcome page help drive up your main website rank?

In short, the more people you can get to Like the page, the more likely you are to keep them engaged and have them share things you post that point back to your website. This will get you more traffic to your main site, and will get you a bigger likelihood of links from other blogs and sites. This drives up page rank.

Of course, people aren't going to do much if your Facebook timeline is empty. So it is essential that you share something at least once a day on the Facebook page to make it worth people coming along and coming back to take a look.

In general, for promoting the Facebook page with the aim of getting more people to visit your website, I would suggest a few things:

1) discuss your Facebook page in a blog post, and reference how it is (or you hope it will grow into) a community of people interested in your area of business and sharing their experiences etc.

2) is there something you can give away? Can you offer discount coupons or similar things? Maybe you can offer one of your longer articles you've been sitting on for a while, made into a simple PDF ebook. Visitors will only get it if they like the page (see the Consected page for an example, which I put together today, where you get a free eBook if you like the page)

3) if you do have a give-away of some form, make sure you send an email newsletter pointing people to the page, discussing its merits as a community and telling them what they get for free when they 'like' it

4) once you get more people involved in it, tweet about interesting items on the page occasionally

5) everything you do needs to keep people involved in your brand and so the more activity there is, the better chance of higher page rankings

There is no causal link that I'm aware of between a Facebook page with plenty of fans and a higher ranking website. The page rank may not get boosted directly, but the amount of traffic you get back to your blog and website will grow, which is the real aim of the exercise. Visitors are where your leads come from, not a mystical page rank number. So keep blogging, keep sending email newsletters, keep Facebooking, keep Tweeting and keep updating your website.

And if you'd like a Facebook page like Consected, just drop me a note!

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

My website wants to be the "belle of the ball"

Image via Wikipedia

Am I an amazing website designer? No. Do I know a great website when I see one? I think so. The challenge I have when designing a website is not getting carried away and trying to copy the slickly designed sites that are intended to show how great the designer behind the scenes is at design, rather than providing a clean website packed with useful information for my customers, prospects and random Googlers. As I balance a desire to produce a slicker website, I constantly have to remind myself why it is there. And that in itself opens up quite a can of worms. Why is the website there? What is the point of the business it is representing? Can this thing be beautiful and functional?

As a small business owner, I have the self-imposed responsibility for the company website. I'm quite comfortable with this, despite it being horribly time consuming. If I can spend the time to verbalize what I think the company offers customers on the website, then I'm in a better position to talk about it with prospects and partners. It reflects what I alway knew about the best software salespeople I worked with in a previous life as a product manager -- the best of the best could understand enough of the technology to talk lucidly with customers about what they were selling. They didn't just walk in the door with shiny shoes, a big smile and hand over the show to the sales engineer to do the talking. If I can write decent copy for the website, I understand what is being sold well enough and what value it offers the customer. If I end up in technical jargon, or marketing fluff, then I need to think a bit more. Yes, I do regularly go back and read what I have written. Then I add it to the to-do list to fix up later.

So a website now has great content, an aesthetic appeal to match what it is selling. What more is there? If the website has the potential to be the  "belle of the ball", but never stops staring at itself in the mirror, then nobody is going to notice it. Twitter, Facebook, whatever other social media tools are all very nice, if you can generate a credible number of real friends. But as I've seen from my own website stats, a little paid advertising can go a very long way! 

My one rule of websites: flaunt what you have, then when people talk about how beautiful you are you can stun them with your depth of knowledge too.

(It seems that this blog and the Consected website still need a little cosmetic work!)

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Related articles

• Unique Ways to Advertise Your Small Business (brighthub.com)
• 10 Ways to Help Your Website Sell (xemion.com)
• How's Your Website's Health? (smallbusinessmavericks.com)

Despite Twitter, email is still where we communicate

I have a love-hate relationship with email. For tracking work and tasks to be performed, especially in common workflows, email sucks. For communicating with people, the 'offline' nature of email is perfect, since you can send a message and that message will sit and wait in the recipient's inbox until they get a chance to read it. At the other end of the spectrum, Twitter and Facebook feeds just can't claim that: the messages are so transient that they are more like watching TV or listening to the radio, so if you weren't staring at the screen when a post came through, it is likely you'll never know about it.

So my renewed love of email (over social networks, at least) was given a little spark by the news that Constant Contact (don't claim you have never received a newsletter or event invitation from a company using them, because I won't believe you!) acquired Nutshell mail. Why is this interesting to me, or you? Well, quite honestly Twitter and Facebook really start to stress me out when work/life balance skews itself in the 'work' direction. I want to follow what is going on in the network of my friends, associates and the companies I follow, but keeping my head in an application like TweetDeck is unreasonable and a terrible distraction. So the idea of getting a notification email summarizing everything that has happened in my social network world, that sits there until I'm ready to decompress a little and read it, seems like a great idea. Finally, there is a better chance that I will not miss the last minute wedding announcement from a certain friend the far side of the world (you know who you are...), and that I will not miss another VIP announcement related to a local event that my small business is sponsoring. This is what Nutshell mail can offer, a nice summary of what is going on in your online social world, in a consumable email, ready to read when you are ready to read it.

So I still think that email sucks for work that people do in offices that is routine and repeatable: HR recruitTell him its about self-promoing; employee onboarding; travel expense claims; account payable and invoice tracking; new customer account opening; and so on. If you do these types of work regularly, you don't want the tasks getting lost in your email inbox, the same way as you don't want to have to stare at your Twitter and Facebook feeds all day long to know what is happening that affects your business or makes your sales efforts generate more leads. Email is great for less distracting communication, since it isn't just the Twitter equivalent of a crowd of people standing in a room shouting and waving 'HEY, LOOK AT ME!'.

I'll be interested to see where Constant Contact takes Nutshell Mail. It seems like a great addition, as it puts important messages for you where they should be: in your inbox. This ties in really nicely with the process improvement work I do with companies, where we work to free up employee's email inboxes by taking the routine work out of them, leaving the inbox to do what it does best: hold messages you need to know about but can deal with later.

A post from the Improving It blog

Edit ... OK. So the scoop is I'm married to a senior-ish person at CTCT. I'm not being paid for this blog post (the obvious pay-back is no more than you'd expect - and a whole pile of chores to complete at the weekend). And if you have read my blog before you'll know that this post is as relevant to the constant information sharing (and subsequent self-promotion) that is a blog such as mine. There you go - official cya declaration done. Oh, and the second declaration is that as much as I enjoy the concept of Facebook and Twitter, they really do stress me out. But please do follow me anyway at http://twitter.com/consected

Cheers, Phil